I was
born frugal. I was also born clean and orderly. My dedication to the last two
items has sometimes left people speechless because, as I suppose, they consider
me neurotic and don’t want to risk setting off a crazy man. But have people
ever given me hell about my frugality! Some of my happiest childhood memories are of taking my 25-cent allowance
down to the polished marble of State Bank where hot-looking tellers treated me
like a man. What do my detractors remember? Throwing away money on crap they
didn’t need and didn’t even want a week after they got it, and that's assuming they didn’t
break it on the way home?
My
father-in-law, Earl, overlooked my drinking, my atheism, and my hippie fro. Likewise, he said nary a word about my screwing
around; was silent regarding my inability to hold a job; didn’t flinch when I
put my marijuana pipe in the sink for his wife to wash (although he flinched a
little when I played Back in the USSR
just for him); and never complained about me being kicked out of the Air Force after he had pulled strings to get me the assignment I wanted; but he has harangued me for 42 years because I save money. He had
another son-in-law who declared bankruptcy, and I sometimes wonder if Earl ever
bitched at him. The last time he was on my case was the last time I saw him, naturally,
when he looked at me quite somberly in the presence of four other people and suggested
that a lead coffin wouldn’t protect my money from the fires of hell. Okaaay!
He’s a Baptist deacon, and I’m pretty convinced that heaven isn’t where most
of them are going, so I’ll just have to bow to his expertise.
Given
her father’s attitude, you’re probably wondering how Peggy feels about my
frugality. Well, she’s frugal too, which makes it a little odd that Earl never
criticizes her. She makes noises every now and then about splurging on
something, but she doesn’t have it in her to truly go overboard—knock on wood.
Like me, if there’s something she really wants, she gets it. Also, like me, she
buys better than average quality (it’s seldom sensible to buy the very best),
but we’re people with simple tastes. We’re also people who tend to anticipate
bad things happening and to prepare for them. Money is a great protector from much that can go wrong in life—it’s literally
a lifesaver in America where the government and insurance companies have no
problem with allowing people to die by the thousands in what politicians call, “the
most generous nation on earth.” If Peggy and I weren’t frugal, she couldn’t have
cut back to working part-time several years ago, and she sure couldn’t be
planning to retire in two years.
The
biggest difference between us regarding money is that Peggy is more likely to
buy something on the spur of the moment (“I’m going to treat myself,” as she puts
it), whereas I usually think about a purchase for anywhere from a few days to a
few months. The usual result is that I lose interest in buying it. When I do
buy something on the spur of the moment, I regret it more often than not. For
example, I bought a scented oil diffuser last month. If I had thought the
purchase over for a few days, I would have remembered that Peggy and I often
have opposing scent preferences, but as I stood there in that shop, I made a
decision to allow myself to ride a wave of emotion. I justified this by telling
myself that I was being childlike when what I was really being was childish. Now,
I’m sorry I abandoned my usual prudence, and I regret owning something I don’t
want but don’t have a great way to get rid of. My country is facing bankruptcy
and my species is burning through the earth’s resources like there’s no
tomorrow (which might be true given how we behave) because most people are improvident, and my purchase, small though it was, exemplified that.
I suppose Earl must think I'm denying myself too much, but I actually have no desire to spend
money on anything I don’t already own except for a few items that cost so
much they’re no brainers. For instance, I wouldn’t mind having a new van to
camp in and a new car for Peggy to go to work in simply because I would
anticipate them being more dependable than our old ones, but our ’93 Chevy and’98
Camry look good, run fine, and have less than a hundred thousand miles on them. I
would also like to build an addition onto the house so I could maintain a
resident masseuse to massage me in the middle of the night when the pain wakes me up. Travel? No, it’s too much work; there's no place I want to go that I haven't already been to; and I would miss my house,
my cat, and my dog. I wouldn’t mind an occasional train trip maybe, but there’s
no place in the world I had rather be than the Oregon coast, mountains, and
deserts, and each of those is within a two hour drive....
I just
thought of someplace I would like to
go. I would like to have a private pilot fly me to cities with world-class gardens, museums, and plant conservatories. A chauffeur would pick me up,
take me to an elegant hotel, and then drive me back and forth until I had seen
everything. Too bad I can’t afford a live-in a masseuse or luxurious trips to art museums. As for new cars, I wouldn’t pay what they cost. Other people do,
and if they think a new car is worth a year’s labor not counting interest, that’s
fine with me, but to put it out there in all its bluntness, I would feel like
an idiot.
Something
else that strikes me as so outrageous that I can’t imagine doing it is gambling.
I drove through Vegas once and stopped long enough to take a look at the inside
of a casino. While there, I thought, what the hell, I might as well gamble, so
I put a quarter into a slot machine, cranked the handle, and lost my quarter. I
grieved for that quarter all the way to Fresno because I violated my integrity by gambling with it. Of course, I’ve
known quite a few responsible people (hi, KJ) who liked casinos, but they seriously
weird me out. Gambling is sort of like paying someone to hit you over the head
and then feeling like a winner whenever they happen to miss. That’s what
happens in casinos; you lose, lose, lose; then you win a little; and then you brag
about your winnings to all your friends as if to suggest that you outsmarted
the bastards. Yeah, sure you did.
When I
started taking money out of banks and putting it into mutual funds, Peggy,
remembering how bummed I was over that quarter, worried that I would freak-out
completely if we should lose thousands. Well, we’ve lost entire years of income
a few times by now, but it wasn’t me who freaked out. I handled it better than Peggy
simply because I’m less of a pessimist than she, which is really saying
something. Anytime we lose money, I try to hold onto the thought that it’s a
temporary glitch, whereas Peggy concludes that it’s the first day of The Great
Depression II. Now that she’s planning to retire in 25 months—right when the
nation, if not the world, seems poised to go down the drain financially—I must
admit that losing money hurts more than it used to.
There’s
no getting away from the fact that you can do the very best you know how and
still get screwed simply because life isn’t fair. Like turtles crossing a road,
some of us come to a much worse end than others, and it’s not always because we
behaved worse. The advantage of frugality is simply that you better your odds
(sort of like a turtle who crosses the road quickly versus one who takes his
time). I’ve often been told that I
can’t take it with me when I die, as if a person’s goal should be to spend his
last dollar on the day he stops breathing. No thanks; I had rather leave a
little to charity. I donate some money already to civil liberties, animal
welfare, public broadcasting, and environmental groups, but hardly enough to
hurt. Since it looks like charities will still be needing money when I’m gone,
that’s when they’ll get the bulk of mine. Until then, I might need it myself.
I
guess I've made it clear that Earl isn’t the only one who’s judgmental
regarding money. It’s just too bad that the only thing he and I agree on is
that it’s better not to gamble, although he would argue that the stock market
IS gambling. Now that I've become convinced that this country is racing out of
control atop a highway paved with greed and stupidity, it is starting to
feel that way.
The photo is of me with my fourth
most expensive possession (after the house and vehicles). It cost $1,900
several years ago, and that was money well spent.
Posts
I
have 262 followers. Some are dead; some have deleted their blogs; some haven’t
posted in years; many if not most never left a comment on my blog. Here’s the thing
about blogging. You could post nothing but underexposed and out of focus
pictures of driftwood, yet you could still have 800 followers and sixty laudatory comments per post if you did nothing all day but leave flattering comments on
other people’s blogs. I used to receive 25-40 comments per post, but I became overwhelmed by guilt because I felt obligated to visit everyone who left a
comment, and I couldn’t do it, at least not without spending my days on the
Internet, so I all but stopped, and, no surprise, most people stopped visiting
me.
